Editor’s Note: This is the second in a series by Speaker Gingrich on American despotism. Watch Speaker Gingrich discuss his series here. Read the first in the series here.
The current crisis did not appear suddenly and without warning.
The problems of the breakdown of the rule of law, the violations of our constitutional rights, and the weaponization of government to coerce the American people are not primarily the result of a few bad apples.
The Biden family manipulation of official status to make money from foreign governments (often adversaries of America) is bad. But it is only a small part of a much larger pattern.
READ MORE from Newt Gingrich: American Despotism
President Barack Obama turning the rule of law into the rule of power, protecting corruption and law breaking within his administration, and methodically seeking to undermine and cripple the person chosen by the American people to succeed him marks an extraordinary set of violations of the constitutional system. But it took a lot more people than just Obama for it to happen.
Sen. and then-Secretary Hillary Clinton broke a lot of rules, took a lot of money, and routinely lied to the American people. But she could do so only because the system was rigged and violators on the left were protected from prosecution by the Obama system.
When you dig into the larger facts behind the stories, it becomes clear we are not faced with a disease that can be eliminated by going after a handful of people. America today is threatened by a culture and system of left-wing hostility to the Constitution, the rule of law, American history, and to the core concept of America.
There are tens of thousands of left-wing radicals in universities, newsrooms, bureaucracies, major law firms, big corporations, and elected offices. They mutually reinforce the fight to destroy the Constitution and replace the rule of law with the rule of power. All the while, they weaponize the government and culture to coerce the American people into their values.
Again, these thousands of radicals in positions of influence and power did not appear overnight. The crisis has deep historic roots. I became an historian because I deeply believe you must investigate history to understand the present — and prepare for the future.
There have been countless warnings about ignoring history:
We live in an anti-historic cultural period. There are so many current events and activities that we drown in the present. The collapse of our education system and the passionate desire of the Left to avoid learning from history leads to presentism. This assumes that there are no precedents, events, or experiences from the past worth learning that are helpful and relevant to today.
Yet, in the better-informed world beyond the current determined ignorance of the past, it is a simple fact that you cannot understand where we are if you don’t understand the roots of where we came from. To understand the depth of the crisis, the genuine threat of American despotism, and the roles of Obama, Clinton, and Biden, we must begin by examining the long growth of anti-Americanism.
The crisis of the Great Depression led many people to turn to communism and socialism as better ways for people to organize their lives. Key elements of the American news media and academic community fostered a belief that free-market capitalism was inherently exploitive and a collectivist system would be far better for the people.
This optimistic view of the power of government to improve things was enhanced by elements of the news media, which were deeply committed to helping the communist cause. An example of the biased, propagandistic media approach to protecting the image of communism was the Pulitzer Prize given to New York Times reporter Walter Duranty in 1931. Duranty was an apologist for Joseph Stalin who deliberately minimized the famine that was killing millions in Ukraine. He constantly changed reports of Stalin’s brutality and tyranny into an acceptable requirement of governing what he called “an Asiatic people.” Some experts believe Duranty’s false reporting was a factor in convincing President Franklin D. Roosevelt to recognize the Soviet Union in 1933. (READ MORE: One Heart and One Mind: The Tyranny of Xi Jinping Thought)
Duranty’s lies are brilliantly portrayed in a 2019 movie, Mr. Jones, about the Welsh reporter who physically went to Ukraine, saw the horrors of mass starvation, and fought to get it reported despite every effort of the elite media to maintain a wall of silence protecting Stalin and the communist dictatorship.
Even after it was clear that Duranty was just an apologist for Stalin and a propagandist for the communist regime, he remained a respected reporter who was largely unchallenged in his own lifetime for the pro-Soviet falsehoods he had fabricated. (RELATED: The Great Lesson: Statue of Stalin Consecrated in Russia)
The New York Times’ ability to report false stories about communism that favored the Left came up again when Herbert Matthews reported in the late 1950s and early 1960s that Fidel Castro was not a communist, and there were no communists in the new Castro government. His reporting convinced the State Department that Castro replacing the Batista dictatorship would be a positive step for freedom.
As dishonest as Matthews was, his pro-Castro activities pale into banality compared to what is described in Peter Kornbluh’s May/June 2018 Politico Magazine article “‘My Dearest Fidel’: An ABC Journalist’s Secret Liaison with Fidel Castro.” The piece outlines the story of a lead ABC correspondent’s personal relationship with Castro and its impact on American news and diplomacy. She had an unethical romantic relationship with Castro and pushed for closer U.S.-Cuban relations. It is a perfect, if rather extreme, example of the news media’s willingness to help the radical Left while doing everything it can to ignore or hurt conservatives.
Of course, a repeat of the Duranty absurdity recently occurred when the New York Times and the Washington Post were given Pulitzer Prizes in 2018 for coverage of what we now know were a series of falsehoods about President Donald Trump and Russia. Furthermore, we now know that the falsehoods were deliberately — and, at times, illegally — fed to the two newspapers by intelligence and FBI sources who played them like musical instruments.
“No enemies to the left” is a slogan that goes back to the French Revolution. Tragically, Alexander Kerensky used it in 1917 to unify the Left, including Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks, against the monarchists and conservatives in the opening phases of the Russian Revolution. Of course, the Russian Left then devoured the Kerensky regime and established the Soviet dictatorship.
The elite media has totally adopted this slogan — as well as “no sources on the right.” This has shaped much of modern American history. Communists, fellow travelers, socialists, and the new Left have received defensive and protective treatment while anti-communists and conservatives have been vilified and lied about. This process of protecting and apologizing for communists was already well established by 1945, and, at the end of World War II, there were a surprising number of Soviet influence agents in American government and society.
As Diana West brilliantly outlines in her book American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character, there were at least 500 agents of the Soviet Union working in the United States government by the end of World War II. The Left did everything possible to ignore the scale of the Soviet infiltration. (There is similar reluctance to talk about the scale of Chinese communist infiltration and influence in our universities, government, and business community today.)
The depth of Soviet penetration of the American government became clear when a former communist–turned–Time magazine senior editor named Whittaker Chambers testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee (which was originally created to deal with Nazi efforts to penetrate the United States but converted to investigating communist penetration after the defeat of Nazi Germany).
Chambers admitted to having been a Soviet agent in the 1930s and named several high-ranking officials as communist agents. The most famous was Alger Hiss. Hiss was a senior State Department official at the Yalta Conference between Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin. He was the American leader in developing the United Nations and was secretary general of the conference that created the U.N. When he left government in 1946, he became president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Hiss was so famous — and so much a part of the establishment — that the elites rallied around him. They simply could not believe he would have spied for Stalin. He sued Chambers for libel. Then-Rep. Richard Nixon helped bring together the evidence that proved Hiss had lied. Hiss lost the libel trial in a huge upset for the establishment that had endorsed him.
Chambers captured the threat of Soviet tyranny and the challenge of competing with a totalitarian regime in the remarkable book Witness, which educated and inspired a generation of conservative anti-communists.
Of course, years later, Nixon, who had fought for the truth, was savaged as a crude, dishonest anti-communist. Hiss — who really was a Soviet spy betraying his own country — was defended and honored even after being proven a liar. We now know from recently released documents that Hiss secretly received the Order of the Red Star for exceptional service to the Soviet Union. Yet, today there are those on the left who insist on his innocence. (RELATED: The Undeserved Rehabilitation of J. Robert Oppenheimer)
Hiss was not alone in spying on and betraying the American government. A senior Soviet agent, Harry Dexter White, was a senior Treasury Department official and a key leader in the Bretton Woods Conference on monetary policy for the post-war world. He became the U.S. director to the International Monetary Fund. He was also a spy who passed a great deal of information to the Soviet Union.
In the most famous espionage case, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed in 1953 for running a spy ring that gave highly classified secrets about the nuclear-weapons program to the Soviet Union. There were many on the left who thought Ethel was innocent until the collapse of the Soviet Union revealed conclusively that she had been an active and productive leader who helped substantially accelerate the Soviet atomic bomb program.
The late 1940s were a deeply divisive time of discovering genuine Soviet penetration of American society and coming to grips with the reality that our ally against Nazi Germany had become a serious threat to dominate the world. A significant minority of Americans rejected any suggestion that the Soviet Union was a threat. Former Vice President Henry Wallace, running on the Progressive American Labor ticket, took an openly anti–Cold War position. He came in fourth with 1,157,000 votes (2.37 percent of the total).
The reality of communist support in the United States extended far beyond government officials. In 1947, Ronald Reagan, then-president of the Screen Actors Guild, convinced the guild to change its rules to require union officials to pledge they were not communists. Reagan acted because he had become convinced through private conversations with hard-line communists in Hollywood that they really wanted to take over the country. One communist casually told Reagan that when the communists won, Reagan would either go to prison or be shot. From that point on, Reagan was an active anti-communist. Forty-four years later, the Soviet Union disappeared.
A small but militant, generally well-educated American Left simply rejected the notion that Stalin and the Soviet dictatorship posed a threat to America. In fact, many of them admired the communist system. As late as 1989, the most widely used economic textbook, called “Samuelson,” praised the Soviet economy as a highly successful system (the USSR collapsed within two years).
The sympathizers to communism and the Soviet state were generally quiet in the 1950s. With the election of President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1952 and the end of the Korean War, the American people seemed to settle down. There were a few years of prosperity, raising children, pursuing better lives, and embracing a positive general outlook. After all, they had just survived a decade of depression, a world war, and the initial phase of post-war economic transition. However, they still faced confusion and uncertainty with the opening phase of the Cold War.
Beneath the calm, the academic Left was working overtime to create a substantial critique of the American system, a growing condemnation of the least defensible parts of that system (segregation, subordination of women, relatively puritanical sexual values and behaviors, a commitment to order and uniformity over innovation and experimentation, and others). Intellectuals such as Herbert Marcuse were creating a deep sophisticated repudiation of traditional Western values. Activist organizers such as Saul Alinsky were developing a doctrine of agitation, division, confrontation, and hostility to force change on a society they regarded as repressive and deeply unfair.
The conformity, comfort, and prosperity of the 1950s created pressures for younger people to rebel. The sheer numbers of younger Americans — combined with their dramatically increased purchasing power from the post-war prosperity — created a youth movement that inherently challenged established values and mores. In music and movies, there was a significant shift toward new styles and new stars. The search for change began toward the end of the 1950s.
There were also significant policy debates about change. The sweeping nature of the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education ruling, which ended segregation, led to turmoil throughout the South and some cities in the North. The revolution in jet aircraft and the initial sense of revolutionary change in space further created a sense that everything was possible. (READ MORE: The Antidote to Communism)
The 1960 U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s approval of the first birth control pill ushered in a revolution in sexual openness. The gradual spread of recreational drugs increased the sense of rebellion against authorities. So, the 1960s became a period of dramatic and widespread rebellion against the traditional American system and its values. Some of the rebelliousness out was cultural more than political.
The 450,000 people who went to Woodstock in 1969 were generally against the Vietnam War (the event was called “An Aquarian Exposition in White Lake, N.Y. – Three Days of Peace and Music”). But they came more for the 32 musical acts than for a political rally.
However, far more dangerous to the American system than any wave of music, movies, and festivals was the emergence of a hardcore anti-American political movement. It was prepared to engage in violence if that was what it would take to impose its will and force the American system to profoundly change.
This led to the largely forgotten violence of the Left in the 1960s, and it set the stage for the replacement of the rule of law with the rule of power — and the transformation of government by the people to government by the elite.
But that’s next week’s essay.
For more commentary from Newt Gingrich, visit Gingrich360.com.
